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by Bruce Maulden

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Global Warming Reaches ‘Exceptional Territory’

August 30, 2016

Surprise, surprise! Sunshine this early Tuesday on California’s north coast, and it looks strange. After weeks of fog in the AM, we must adjust to a clear, clean sky — a wonderful adjustment, by the way.

And on the subject of the weather/environment, last week California leaped to the forefront of attempting to get a handle on our quickly changing climate — the state assembly passed Senate Bill 32, and Assembly Bill 197, which would require heat-trapping emissions to be reduced to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030. A most excellent move in the right direction, but maybe too little, too late.

One of the problems in getting the handle on this horrifying situation is the slow, seemingly-methodical approach of global warming — it’s not the big splash, but way-lot of small little calamities. Yet the tide is breaking. From the Guardian this morning:

The planet is warming at a pace not experienced within the past 1,000 years, at least, making it “very unlikely” that the world will stay within a crucial temperature limit agreed by nations just last year, according to Nasa’s top climate scientist. This year has already seen scorching heat around the world, with the average global temperature peaking at 1.38C above levels experienced in the 19th century, perilously close to the 1.5C limit agreed in the landmark Paris climate accord. July was the warmest month since modern record keeping began in 1880, with each month since October 2015 setting a new high mark for heat. But Nasa said that records of temperature that go back far further, taken via analysis of ice cores and sediments, suggest that the warming of recent decades is out of step with any period over the past millennium. “In the last 30 years we’ve really moved into exceptional territory,” Gavin Schmidt, director of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said. “It’s unprecedented in 1,000 years. There’s no period that has the trend seen in the 20th century in terms of the inclination (of temperatures).” “Maintaining temperatures below the 1.5C guardrail requires significant and very rapid cuts in carbon dioxide emissions or co-ordinated geo-engineering. That is very unlikely. We are not even yet making emissions cuts commensurate with keeping warming below 2C.” Schmidt repeated his previous prediction that there is a 99-percent chance that 2016 will be the warmest year on record, with around 20-percent of the heat attributed to a strong El Niño climatic event. Last year is currently the warmest year on record, itself beating a landmark set in 2014. “It’s the long-term trend we have to worry about though and there’s no evidence it’s going away and lots of reasons to think it’s here to stay,” Schmidt said. “There’s no pause or hiatus in temperature increase. People who think this is over are viewing the world through rose-tinted spectacles. This is a chronic problem for society for the next 100 years.”